The Chicago Football: Tallest Tale of the Atomic Age

By Arthur Flax

Before Oppenheimer, there was Leona. And the Nazis were after her This is the only slightly exaggerated telling of how America's first Nuclear Reactor got built by a young woman, a race car designer and a group of brilliant fledgling scientists under a football stadium

It's December 1, 1941. The place is Chicago at the abandoned Amos Alonzo Stagg football field of the University of Chicago. The University has scrapped its football program to focus on academics. Beneath the field, hundreds of men and some women, scramble through a labyrinth of tunnels to build something called Chicago Pile One.

Enrico Fermi is the designer of this thing called the Chicago Pile, a stack of graphite logs laced with a metal called uranium on the floor of a handball court under the stadium. Working with him, to convert the Italian's crude pencil drawings to a working model is a brilliant young grad student named Leona Wood and Joe Lencke, a race car builder and inventor of auto and aircraft lubricants.

Fermi tells Lencke, Leona and a few associates who "need to know" that the Pile is a sort of "prototype atomic furnace."
But the Germans, they have their own scientists and spies. They know of the "Pile" because they built one first. Theirs exploded They believe that with the right "adjustments" the "furnace" can become a bomb. A very big bomb. They also know that their Japanese Allies will attack America at Pearl Harbor within a week. Hitler doesn't want to be upstaged. On the same day as the Japanese will invade America, they intend to unleash this new weapon and kill thousands in the center of one of America's largest and most important cities.

What they don't count on is that Leona is a smart girl with two pistols in her pants and a nuclear weapon in her back pocket

Much of this narrative is true, though embellished for the drama and fictionalized with the author's imagination It is based on the lives of Leona Woods Marshall Libby, who has been described as Enrico Fermi's right hand woman. Others who inspired this story included Joe Lencki, who invented the popular oil additive zMax and tuned the mighty B-29 bomber radial engines during World War II. America's top uranium gathering spy in Africa, Wilbur "Dock" Hogue, also plays a major role in this narrative along with Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich.

This is both a novel and a historical narrative and it's illustrated with the real people, places and machines that launched the atomic bomb, nuclear power and some incredible racing cars

Some attention is also given to the growth of the National Football League and battles between the Bears and Redskins - now Commanders - in the early 1940s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HM6XFY5S
• ISBN13: 9798995767718
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Automocity Publishing Company
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"